Sunday, May 18, 2008

So what is a Flame Princess, anyway?

I guess I should get this out of the way.

The entire Flame Princess concept started in 1997 when I was surfing heavy metal websites and came across the site of this one Finnish girl. She'd linked some bands, so... anyway. I'd never seen anyone that looked like that before, and it started my fascination with Finland and long red hair all at once. :P

At the time I was writing awful fiction about an awfully Elric-y concept with dimension traveling and swords. Not that I'd read any Moorcock at that point in time... I'd just kind of reassembled a Moorcockian idea after reading a lot of things directly influenced by Moorcock. Funny how that works, and boy was I pissed when I actually got hold of an Elric book.

Now the email link on that girl's site didn't work (she'd already abandoned it), so I had no concept of her as a person. Just some pictures. So I created a mythology (as I often do around women that seem brilliant that I can't get close to) around her, and she was dubbed the Flame Princess, specifically for inclusion in my fiction.

When I figured out that was going nowhere, and I began my music zine, taking the Flame Princess name was just evocative of the stuff I was listening to at the time... bands like Opeth, Arcturus, Novembers Doom, Solefald, Sculptured. Floofy and poetic titles and lyrics were common features of what I listened to at the time, and it seemed a good way to differentiate myself from all the gory death metal that seemed to dominate the scene at the time.

As the years went on, I came to define myself more and more by my writing efforts. When I started to branch out in 2003 and try other writing, it seemed natural to continue to use the name.

So Lamentations of the Flame Princess is my own personal little brand name for everything. I suspect if I started manufacturing plastic cups, I'd call them LotFP: Cups.

So there that is.

I did eventually catch up with the girl that made that webpage. Unfortunately, she thought I was completely psycho and after not much conversation threatened to call the cops if I ever contacted her again, mainly because I left comments on her (public) blog... she had posted that she was going to see some concert, and I knew the band and had interviewed the songwriter several times; he knew who I was. So I mentioned to her that if she told the guy that she was the Flame Princess, he'd get it. That set her off. Ah well. That wasn't so creepy or threatening, was it?